Happy New Year!

I wish each and every one of you an amazing 2012.

May it be wonderful beyond your expectations.

Happy New Year!

A Wish for a Truly Wonderful New Year

This morning, I read this quote on Charlie’s always insightful blog,

Tomorrow never comes, because when it does it’s always today.

What a perfect sentiment for this time of year, when most of us are reflecting on the past year and looking ahead towards the next. In a moment where we’re living with one foot in the past and the other in the future, its hard to forget that there is still a “today” to contend with.

Living in the present is certainly relevant to what I’ve been writing about this week, and this  unintended theme has really forced me to take a look at how I view the world. I suppose that I have always, to some extent, really reveled in the beauty of the people and the world around me. It’s why I spent so many years in college studying one thing after another, always awestruck by how the more I learned, the more questions I had. I think if finances would have allowed, I would still be in school. It’s the reason I teach. Although, as with most jobs, the drawbacks are many, the one big plus is the fact that I can try to pass on that love of learning… no, more than that, the love of living, of which learning is an integral part. It’s this very fact that allows me to be, despite many, many setbacks and challenges, to be a fundamentally happy person.

And this is the very thing that I want to make sure my daughter grows up with. I had my grandfather to set that example for me. (This post is about to go in an unintended direction, but what the hell, I’ll go with it)…

My grandfather was, perhaps, one of the most remarkable people who I have ever met.  He was more than a grandfather, more than a father… the role he played in my life had no precedent, and thus, no title.  He was my moral compass, my teacher, my guide, my sanctuary… the only person on the planet who knew me better than I knew myself.  He loved me unconditionally, every single day of my life.  He never let me feel anything but loved, no matter what mistakes I made (and boy did I make many!).   I am who I am today in a very large part because of him.

His love for my grandmother was all-consuming.  He loved her more than life itself.  He never spoke down to her, always told her and showed her how much he loved her.  He told her how beautiful he was until the day he died.  His willingness to sacrifice for her, and for everyone he loved, made each relationship he touched near perfect.  Granted, he set the bar so high that I’m afraid I’ll never find that perfection with someone else,  but it does give me hope.

His faith was boundless, yet he never proselytized.  He never belittled any beliefs that diverged from his own, yet never wavered from his faith.  Again, in this aspect, he led by example.  His actions spoke louder than any words ever could have, even if shouted from the highest mountain tops. He was always kind, always tolerant, never judgmental, loving without exception and abundant in his generosity.

He elevated and inspired everyone.  He sacrificed, yet always expressed joy in everything he did.  He loved completely, and lived life with a happiness that never diminished.  He epitomized that life lived with a sense of magic, awe, and wonder.

He passed away last year, and next week would have been his 83rd birthday. Needless to say, I miss him daily. But even in his absence he continues to be all of those things to me, and now, I’m trying with all that I am to be the same for my daughter, in whatever way that I am capable of.

As I think of him, of myself, and of my daughter, I am pushed to reflect on the past year; on what I’ve done, said, thought, experienced, and felt. I suppose that as the year draws to a close, it’s as good a time as any to stop and think about the many lessons we’ve learned, and how we can continue forward into the next year with strength and happiness.

As I wrote last Friday, I am in the process of trying to heal from an incredibly painful split from someone who I still love immensely. When things like this happen, it’s all too easy to shut off and shut down, or to really try to forget and close the chapter. I suppose its self-preservation. Despite that, I’ve decided not to give in to it.  Living with an openness to all the beauty that the world can offer means having an open heart, and it was exactly that, despite the initial challenges we faced in our relationship, that made it possible to love him as deeply and honestly as I did. Lessening the pain is never a good enough reason to shut myself off to the potential of having that again. It is, if nothing else, what my grandfather would have done.

In the mean time, I am happy knowing that I am starting the year without anger or bitterness, and with the same openness that I stepped into 2011 with. I will continue to live with the sense of magic and awe that I have been writing about this past week, and I will absolutely continue to make sure that my daughter grows up with the same sense of infinite possibility.

I wish all of you out there a very happy and truly wonderful start to an as of yet unwritten part of our lives. 2012 will be as good as we make it. Let’s all resolve to continue to keep reading books that make us think, listing to music that touches our souls, and looking upon the world with eyes that can see the ordinary as extraordinary.

Happy 2012!

And did anyone else notice that last night’s moon looked like a smile?

Where did all the nothing go?

Last night as I was fighting a particularly bad bout of insomnia, I came across this comic strip from folks over at sci-ence.  Keeping with the week’s theme, it reminds us that even when it seems that nothing is happening and boredom starts to creep in, that in this fantastic universe of ours, “nothing” never happens.

We used to be able to say things like ‘the vast nothingness of space” and have an idea of what that meant. But we know there is, in fact, lots of ‘things’ in between the regular ‘stuff’ in space. Dark matter, dark energy, virtual particles, the fabric of spacetime itself. These are things we cannot get rid of without stepping outside the known boundaries of our universe. The more we discover the more nothing recedes into abstraction and I really like when familiar concepts we take for granted are overturned upon scrutiny.

Nadir, the author of the comic strip, writes, and I heartily agree, that

I’m encouraged* whenever I see young kids interested in the mechanics of reality and want to tell them not to ever stop questioning those who give them answers.. . . I heard Neil Tyson give an interview where he mentioned how he had decided early on never to stop his children from exploring no matter how dirty they got or what they broke in the house. That curiosity for reality becomes so ephemeral during teen years that anything to cement it early on sounds to me like a good thing.

Let’s keep fostering in us, our kids, and each other, that sense of magic and wonder at all that this amazing planet has to offer.  Reminding ourselves and each other of the importance of living with open eyes, minds, and hearts is quite possibly one of the best gifts that we can give.

The Landscape of Books

Sometimes the sense of awe, magic, and wonder can come from looking at the ordinary in extraordinary ways. This is exactly what artist Guy Laramée does, and remarkably well.

"La Grande Bibliothèque"

My work. . . originates from the very idea that ultimate knowledge could very well be an erosion instead of an accumulation. The title of one of my pieces is “ All Ideas Look Alike”. Contemporary art seems to have forgotten that there is an exterior to the intellect. I want to examine thinking, not only “What” we think, but “That” we think.

These words are from Laramée, who, very much in keeping with this weeks unofficial theme, evokes that same sense of awe by forcing us to look at the very books that we love in a fundamentally different way. For most of us, our relationship with books is focused mostly on their content, on the written page. At times that love might extend to their covers, as books can often be as beautiful to look at as they are to read. But that’s normally as far outside of the book that we are willing to go. After all is said and done, we love our books for what they offers us; for the ideas they transmit, for all teach us, for the endless places we are taken to through their narratives. We love our books because they challenge us and force us to think and rethink. We love books because through them we can travel through time and space, we can take part in discourses that occurred centuries before we born, and we can visit places that as exotic as our imaginations allow.

Laramée, through his sculptural work, takes our relationship with books and turns it around, forcing us completely outside. After Laramée is through carving his inexplicably beautiful landscapes into the volumes, the books cease to be about what they contain, and are completely redefined for us.

So I carve landscapes out of books and I paint Romantic landscapes. Mountains of disused knowledge return to what they really are: mountains. They erode a bit more and they become hills. Then they flatten and become fields where apparently nothing is happening. Piles of obsolete encyclopedias return to that which does not need to say anything, that which simply IS. Fogs and clouds erase everything we know, everything we think we are.

Here are some images of his bibliolandscapes. Many more can be found here, on his site.

"Ryoanji"

"Grand Larousse"

"Longmen"

"Thoreau"

"Petra"

Wonder, Awe, and More Street Art

In keeping with this week’s unplanned theme of living with a sense of wonder, I wanted to share these images with you. Last night I was browsing through the same street art blog where I had found that fabulous Darwin image that I posted last week, and I came across this brilliant work by Spanish urban artist Sam3.

Yesterday I wrote about the importance of keeping a sense of awe and magic as we grow up and older, and there is something about this particular image that speaks to that very thing. The individual sits on his firmly rooted perch while his eyes gaze in wonder and longing at the ineffable infinity of the stars above him. Just takes my breath away.

This one wall is par of a larger set, that when taken together becomes even more stunning, and speaks to that idea even more. Moreover, it reinforces the belief in our potential. We are not only capable of developing the ideas that help us understand our universe, but we can transform our spaces in to places that exude magic and make them truly wonderful. It shows how we have the ability to make the ordinary, extraordinary.

Although Miami is not necessarily a cultural Mecca, I think its appropriate to point out our Wynwood Walls, where, since 2009, artists have been using the drab, cinderblock, industrial buildings of the Wynwood neighborhood as their canvas, not only beautifying but actually revitalizing the once-avoided area.

Our New Telescope!

Finally assembled and ready to go, here’s the telescope that Santa brought us for Christmas. I’m hoping to be able to head out into a less light-polluted area sometime this week for a good look at our night sky. I can’t wait for my daughter to get her first good look at the moon! Of course, I’ll write all about it once we go on our first astronomy adventure.

The Poetry of Science

A while back I picked a book up for my daughter. Although she’s still way too young for it, I thought it would be a good book for her to have when she got old enough, and curious enough. The book is The Magic of Reality by Stephen Richard Dawkins (beautifully illustrated by Dave McKean). I got her this book for the same reason that Santa brought us a telescope for Christmas, I want her to grow up with a sense of the magic and beauty of the world around her, and in awe and wonder of the skies above her. I also want her to grow up with a definite appreciation of how thinking and reason can reveal things that are even more awesome, magical, beautiful, and wonderful.

For a small child, maintaining that sense of wonder is pretty easy; there’s still a sense of novelty to everything they experience. For us, on the other hand, its much more difficult. We fall into the rut of our own lives and seldom seek out experiences that remind us of what a fascinating universe we live in. This past year, thankfully, its been harder than usual to ignore, with news of super-luminal neutrinos that defy the laws of modern physics and the discovery (maybe) of the “God” particle. But in case you need a little more reminding, here’s a video of a conversation between two great minds, Richard Dawkins, evolutionary biologist and skeptic, and Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist, talking about the “Poetry of Science.”

I know this video is a bit on the long side, but I highly recommend giving, at least a bit of it, a watch. It is a true pleasure to see these two incredibly intelligent men speak of science and the understanding of our universe, our world, and ourselves, so beautifully.

Like standing in front of an impressively designed building, or reading the words of a great writer, listening to Dawkins and Tyson should serve as a reminder of what we, as human beings can be capable of. Although it may sometimes seem that we are wasting away in front of reality television, listening in on this conversation should remind us that all is nowhere near lost. There are still some of us out here thinking our way through life.

Not to mention that, as one of the video commenters stated, this really is “comfort food for the brain.”

Enjoy!

Saturn, scale and Monty Python?

As you all are probably well aware by now, I love astronomical photography. Whether its images taken as close to home as our moon and solar system, or pictures of the ultra-deep field, I am always left in awe as to how immense our universe is, and conversely, how small we really are. But seldom do those images really communicate the “largeness” of astronomy. It’s incredibly difficult to get a sense of scale from the images, and looking at the numbers doesn’t necessarily help. Saying that something is over two million light years away (like the Andromeda galaxy) may begin to give us a sense of the immensity of space, but really, we have no way to even begin to understand or conceive of those kinds of distances.

Then I see an image like this one. It’s of Saturn and two of its moons, Enceladus, the larger one, and Epimetheus, the tiny, almost invisible speck to the left.

Saturn and two moons. Click to see it at full resolution.

Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy describes this image.

This image shows, of course, the ringed planet itself, with the rings seen edge-on and their shadow cast across the planet’s southern hemisphere cloud tops. But look to the left, just below the rings; see that half-lit disk? That’sEnceladus, an icy moon of Saturn. It’s about 500 km (310 miles) across, which may start to give you an idea of how much area this picture covers. Even though it’s as big as my home state of Colorado, it’s positively dwarfed by the looming presence of Saturn behind it… and we’re not even seeing very much of the planet here! Saturn is over 120,000 km (75,000 miles) across, nine times the diameter of Earth.

Saturn is big.

He later goes on to write that the one thing he wishes people understood better about the universe is scale. I agree. It’s rare that a photograph conveys the sheer massiveness of the universe, and as he says, “we’ve barely dipped our toes in it.”

When I saw this image I instantly started humming Monty Python‘s the Galaxy Song; it tends to happen whenever I see a photo that really makes our relative size in the universe undeniable. I’ve included it here, have a listen and a laugh, and remember that your standing on a planet that’s revolving…

Enjoy!

Related articles

• Astronomy Picture of the Day for Sept. 4th (witchesofthecraft.wordpress.com)
• Saturn’s moon Enceladus spreads its influence (physorg.com)
• Scale of Saturn of the Day (geeks.thedailywh.at)

Merry Christmas

A very merry, warm, and wonderful Christmas to everyone out there in the blogosphere.

‘Tis the season… for a little more astronomy!

Out of the many presents that I got for my daughter this year, the one I think we’re both most excited about is a telescope. She’s been asking for one for months now, and “Santa” finally decided to get her (and her mom) a pretty nice reflector telescope for Christmas. In anticipation of this gift we’ve been looking at astronomy pictures almost daily, and today we came across this one, again courtesy of Phil Plait (click the link as he offers, as usual, a great explanation of what it is we’re seeing here). As soon as she saw it she yelled out “It’s Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer!” And indeed, it really does look like him!

Click to see it at full resolution.

Hope everyone has a wonderful Christmas Eve.